Must Higher Education Always Genuflect Before America’s Highest Incomes?

But noble sentiments like these have long taken a distinct backseat at elite universities. How wide a backseat? Associated Press journalists at one recent point tried to find out. They asked 30 of America’s most selective colleges how many legacy students they enroll. Only eight responded.

Out of Harvard, one of the nonrespondents, some revealing data did eventually emerge, but only after a lawsuit revealed that the university’s acceptance rate for applicants from legacy families averaged 34 percent between 2014 and 2019, over five times the 6 percent acceptance rate for applicants without legacy status.

Overall, as one new national advocacy group for equitable admissions has been highlighting, the dozen universities that make up the “Ivy-plus colleges” have more students coming from America’s most affluent 1 percent than our entire bottom 50 percent. These 12 institutions of higher learning currently hold, the new Class Action group adds, over a quarter-trillion dollars in their endowments.

Have legacy admissions essentially become too baked in to effectively challenge? Maybe not. A controversial Supreme Court ruling last year — in a case that involved Harvard and the University of North Carolina — has unintentionally given new life to the drive against legacy welcomes.

In that case, the high court ruled that colleges and universities must no longer take race into consideration in admission decisions. But how could the court, as one Princeton student has pointed out, strike down race-based affirmative action while leaving in place “forms of affirmative action that favor the historically privileged,” most notably the legacy admissions “crafted to exclude minorities — first on the basis of religion, then on the basis of race.”

Education equality activists have seized on that contradiction. The Supreme Court’s move to gut affirmative action on race, as Politico reports, has “supercharged efforts to outlaw legacy admissions at universities.”

This past March, Virginia banned legacy admissions in the state’s public colleges and universities. Illinois soon afterwards ended legacy and donor preferences in its public higher education system. Maryland would go a step further. The state earlier this year become the first in the nation to ban legacy preferences at both public andprivate universities. California last month followed suit.

At the federal level, President Biden has blasted legacy admissions as practices that expand “privilege instead of opportunity,” and members of Congress have introducedlegislation that would ban the privileges that legacy admissions provide.

But the legacy bans enacted so far, the Education Reform Now analyst James Murphy fears, all share a clear flaw. These bans do not thoroughly enough define the admission practices that would rate as illegal. Murphy is pushing for legislation that would be far more specific.

To be effective, Murphy notes as an example, a ban on legacy admissions should have language that prevents universities from including in documents used to consider applicants “any information that discloses the name of a college or university that any relative of the applicant attended.”

Reforms along that direction can certainly limit the wiggle room elite universities have to give admission preferences to students from wealthy families. But application reforms can only take us so far. They cannot offset the wide array of imposing advantages our wealthiest can give their young.

Say, for instance, that the admission decisions that elite universities make suddenly became totally “merit”-based. The rich would still be free to line up for their children the best tutors and educational experiences that money could buy. Those tutors and experiences would give their children a much better shot at academic — and life — success than the children of families without grand fortunes.

So where does that leave us? Moves to reform the college admissions process still make eminent sense. But we can’t kid ourselves. We can only truly level that admissions process by taking serious steps to level how we distribute our nation’s income and wealth.